Days of Present Past

Part one. Originally posted Feb 5th, 2014

            Happy New Year, everyone!  By now, you’re all probably knee-deep in snow, post-holiday depression, and bills.  I myself just finished up some Holiday fun.  Just an FYI; some of the best Christmas fun to be had is after the actual holiday is over.  Having squeezed out the fiscal Christmas baby and then drank away the new year, the retailers are now left with a holiday hangover and piles of consumer after-birth.  I love roaming the battle-torn stores just after the new year and laughing at all of the merchandise being shoveled out at a fraction of the price it was “on sale” for just a few days prior.  Everyone is in “out with the old, in with the new” mode. 

It is ironic how readily this attitude is embraced by society, considering how much we actually ignore it.  We openly acknowledge that we will most likely break our so called “New Years resolutions” and yet, year after year, we continue to promote the idea of making them.  We buy gym memberships and water bottles that will probably be lost somewhere in the trunks of our cars come March.  We “find religion” and “get spiritual” only to stop when it loses our interest, like it did last year.  We pretend to express interest in political candidates, only to vote based on party lines just like our parents did.  The most frustrating thing I see is people who continue to promote their personal idea of progress as if it is universal and infallible.  It is an almost amusing paradox that the unrelenting freight train of “progress” should be pulling so many of the same old closed-minded, inflexible, and presumptuous prejudices of the past behind it, like so many empty box cars.  If there is one goal of confrontational society today, it is certainly not progress.  It is polarization.

America is becoming more and more polarized with each passing year.  People are increasingly encouraged, if not pressured to pick one of two sides on whatever political, social, or religious issue is currently the hottest.  I always wonder at the enthusiasm of people who embrace this practice.  It makes me wonder how many of them read their horoscopes.  In my mind there should be a correlation between people who believe there can be only two sides to any given issue and people who believe that there are only twelve personality types in the world.  If there is anything these last several years have taught me, it is that there are always more than two sides to any given issue.  Anyone who claims otherwise is simply too threatened and small-minded to accept the unavoidable complexity of humanity.  

I personally blame this reactionary polarization of thinking on post-modernism.  For years, we have been told that no one person’s opinions are any better than another’s.  We have been instructed that tolerance means that we accept other people’s views as being equal to our own.  Guided by the cloudy pillar of skepticism, we have been led to a promised land with no certainties, no absolutes, and definitely no progress.  Think about it; in order to progress to something, you must have a point of reference to progress FROM, which has been impossible to do with the moral relativism of post-modernism in place.  Society has been virtually drowning in a sea of androgenous ambiguity for so long that it has driven us to drastically overcompensate.  We have swum to the dry land of our past convictions, reminiscing of steady passion and unyielding defiance.  The prospect of caring about something we are sure of has outweighed our fear of social tunnel-vision.  Where political correctness was originally used as a conduit for post-modernism, it now functions more as a cover for “progressive” agendas.  Dissention against such agendas is now then no longer considered diversity, it is considered counter to “progress” and thus “backwards”.  When seen in this light, people should not be surprised by rapid shifts in the recent social climate.  It is the heat caused by the friction of a train trying to regain traction; the growing pains of a new “culture war” driven generation that knows what it believes in again.  We just haven’t remembered why yet.  Out with the new, in with the old.

     Before I lose any of you, let’s get to the substance of this essay.  I have recently observed two separate ongoing conflicts in current events which I believe have several things in common.  Firstly, they both involve celebrities.  Secondly, they both have survived the new year with flying colors.  It would appear, if anything, that they have gained popularity.  Thirdly, they both deal with social issues that resemble recognizable conflicts from previous “glory days” of polarized debate.  Finally, although both of these conflicts and their respective instigators have had great success in gathering interest in their causes due to the above mentioned resemblance, neither issue bears the relevance to society that it’s predecessor did.  In our over-eagerness to revive some of the greatest cultural and political debates of the 60’s and 70’s, we have turned to spokespersons who are not only not up to the task, but who actually have little to do with the conflict at hand.  With those thoughts as a backdrop, let us examine the hype surrounding “Duck Dynasty” and “Bill Nye, the Science Guy”.

(end of part one)